


The Long Way Back

by Gruoch



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Angst and Humor, Family Vacations, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Impromptu Road Trips, Nostalgia, Regrets, Tony Stark's had a few, literal and figurative ghost hunts, local man runs from problems, sad New England beaches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-21
Updated: 2018-09-21
Packaged: 2019-07-15 03:43:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16054835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gruoch/pseuds/Gruoch
Summary: “Let’s get out of here,” Tony says suddenly. “Go for a drive or something.”Peter turns to look at him. “Like, right now?”“Yeah, right now.” Tony sits up. “You got something better to do? Go grab some extra clothes and a toothbrush. We’ll make a little weekend trip out of it. You can finish your homework on Sunday night like all the normal, non-dweeb kids.”“Okay,” Peter says brightly, always so amiable. “I gotta run it by May first, though.”“Of course,” Tony replies, already ambling off to get his own things. “Tell her it’ll be educational,” he calls back. “I’ll take you somewhere with a lot of historic value or whatever.”





	The Long Way Back

Not quite a year after the remodeling of the Avengers Facility is completed, Tony finds himself in one of the basement levels with Pepper, staring down stacks of boxes. Most of it is files and mission reports and other sensitive, miscellaneous documentation that needs to be kept for a number of years before being destroyed, just in case the government decides to audit. 

The rest of it, though, consists of personal items, clothes and books and other things left behind by Steve and Natasha and the others, and even some of Bruce’s stuff. Tony had finally had their old quarters packed up and the boxes brought down here so that those rooms could be repurposed.

“So. What would you like to do with all this?” Pepper asks.

“Burn it,” Tony suggests. Pepper rolls her eyes.

“Oh, please,” she says. “You wouldn’t have packed all of this up and dragged it down here if you meant to get rid of it. You never let go of anything. You’d be a lot happier if you did.”

“You’re probably right,” he says.

They set the boxes of personal items aside in a separate storage room where they won’t be disturbed, carefully sorting and labeling each one. He’ll send Clint’s things to his farm, he thinks, but the rest of it he keeps because…why? Some starry-eyed hope that their owners will return for them, he supposes. Or maybe he wants to keep something to remind himself that nothing is permanent, no matter how right or important he believes it to be, a kind of memento mori.

When Tony was a very small child he had asked his father what it was he did, and Howard had told him it was his job to see the future. Tony had loved that line, had eventually adopted it for himself. There are old interviews out there where he’d smugly dropped it into the conversation, unashamedly arrogant. He’d really believed it at one time, but now he’s starting to understand how much of it is nonsense. It hadn’t been true for Howard and it isn’t true for him—they were both merely groping in the dark, barely seeing past the ends of their noses.

Things come together, and things fall apart. He can at least be sure of that much.

“Thanks for always putting up with me,” he tells Pepper as they finish up. “I’m glad you came back.”

“Let’s get one thing straight,” she says, kissing him fondly. “ _I_ didn’t come back. _You_ came back to _me_.”

As in all things, she is correct.

________________________

Tony lies sprawled across the sofa, watching some terrible early morning cable news show through bleary eyes and sipping a ginger ale to settle his stomach. He’d spent the previous evening on the phone with Secretary Ross in heated discussion about revisions and amendments to the Accords, which continue to wreak havoc in Tony’s life so many months after everything went to shit. He’d ended the call abruptly when Ross brought up the incident in Germany yet again and started asking probing questions about a certain unidentified enhanced individual present in the security footage in a way that made Tony’s palms start to sweat.

The enhanced individual in question is currently sitting on the floor near the couch, wearing pajama pants and a sweatshirt emblazoned with his high school’s logo, math homework spread out in front of him on the coffee table. A picture of domestic mundanity. It could break Tony’s heart, looking at him. It’s one of the weekends Tony puts aside in his schedule for Peter to come upstate for training and tooling around in the lab, but Tony can already tell he’s going to have to foist the kid off on Happy the whole weekend while he handles irate government officials. The same thing happened the past few times Peter has come up. The kid never complains but it irks Tony. It’s a little too much like something his father would do, handing Tony off to the help while Howard dealt with more important matters.

The pundits on TV are discussing a recent high profile bank robbery in Dallas committed by a group of enhanced individuals that resulted in the deaths of two security guards and a cop. One of the talking heads starts blathering about the Accords and whether a mandatory registration of all enhanced persons was needed to protect ordinary citizens. 

Tony mutes it. There’s an ache squeezing his head like a vice and he doesn’t want to think about all the mistakes he’s made, of how easily everything he’s worked so hard to build can be torn down and taken away. He can practically feel it all unraveling, slipping out of his control again, all his good intentions mutating into something monstrous.

He can’t help but wonder what Steve would think about all this, wherever the hell he is. He wouldn’t gloat—pettiness is more Tony’s forte. But he can imagine Steve’s implacable righteousness, untouched by weak human emotions like regret and doubt and fear. There were so many things about Steve Rogers that Tony had grown up believing that weren’t true, but he still thinks the man could bend steel by sheer force of will alone. Could make everyone around him feel like they had the same power, if they would just follow him. Tony hates him and admires him for it at the same time. He would give anything to experience that same sense of unyielding conviction for himself.

The kid shuffles over to the couch on his knees, holding out his notebook. “Can you help me with this? My answer doesn’t make any sense.” 

“You don’t need my help. You’ll learn it better if you figure it out yourself,” Tony says automatically, like he’s channeling his father from beyond the grave even as he’s reaching for the notebook. He scans the scrawl and immediately spots the error. He taps the page. “Does that look like the formula you’d use when you have the square root of a single variable?”

“Oh, shit,” Peter says, frowning as he takes the notebook back. “No.”

“You’ve dropped the limit notation after the first step on the problem above that one, too. Sloppy work, kid. I’m sure the teachers at your nerd school will notice and dock points. Go back and do it right.”

“Okay, thanks,” Peter sighs. “So stupid,” he mutters under his breath.

Tony studies him, noting the dark circles under his eyes and the slightly disoriented look he always gets when he’s riding right on the edge of exhaustion and it becomes difficult for him to filter out all the excess input of his heightened senses. “You know this stuff. You’re making mistakes because you’re tired. You need to get more sleep.”

“Probably,” the kid says, furiously erasing.

“Maybe you should think about taking a little break.” Tony doesn’t mean from the homework.

“I’m good, Mr. Stark, really.”

“Alright, well, I tried,” Tony says, worn too thin to argue. He covers his eyes to block out the light boring holes into his skull. His headache has migrated to a densely concentrated spot behind his left eye, a neutron star of agony. “Who the hell does homework at the ass crack of dawn on a Saturday morning, anyway?”

“If I finish it now I can enjoy the rest of my weekend more ‘cause then it’s not hanging over my head,” Peter says, scratching out formulas across the page again. “Plus, I dunno, I kind of like doing the math part. Like doing a puzzle.”

“You’re a big fucking nerd, Parker, you know that?”

“I mean, so are you,” Peter counters with a shrug. 

“Nah. When you get to be as absurdly wealthy as I am, you’re not a nerd anymore,” Tony says. “You’re _eccentric_.”

“Whatever makes you feel better, Mr. Stark,” the kid says blandly.

“Remember when you used to respect me? God, I miss those days,” Tony sighs.

He cracks an eye open and watches Peter work, a comfortable quiet settling between them, broken only by the scratch of the pencil against the paper. The stress of everything must really be getting to Tony, because he feels an intense wave of affection wash over him from out of nowhere. It’s followed closely by an even stronger wave of gut-twisting worry. He wishes he could hold Peter here in this very moment, where the most difficult thing the kid has to overcome is high school calculus.

It terrifies him sometimes, caring this much for something so fragile.

“Let’s get out of here,” Tony says suddenly. “Go for a drive or something.”

Peter turns to look at him. “Like, right now?”

“Yeah, right now.” Tony sits up. “You got something better to do? Go grab some extra clothes and a toothbrush. We’ll make a little weekend trip out of it. You can finish your homework on Sunday night like all the normal, non-dweeb kids.” 

“Okay,” Peter says brightly, always so amiable. “I gotta run it by May first, though.”

“Of course,” Tony replies, already ambling off to get his own things. “Tell her it’ll be educational,” he calls back. “I’ll take you somewhere with a lot of historic value or whatever.”

________________________

“You like oysters?” he asks once they’re on the road. There’s a little place in one of the tiny, ritzy beach towns in Rhode Island that has the best oysters he’s ever eaten. It had been a staple of his childhood summer vacations, one of the better memories of his youth. He hasn’t been back there since his parents died, but he’s been thinking about it a lot lately for some reason. It had been something of a bittersweet surprise to learn that the restaurant was still in business. They can be there by lunch time if the traffic isn’t terrible.

“Sure, I’ll eat anything,” the kid says. If it was anyone else Tony would say that they were lying to appease him, but Peter is unfailingly sincere in a way that occasionally aggravates Tony. Right now, though, it’s exactly what he needs. His headache has already subsided to a dull pinch as they pull farther away from the compound and all the aggravations piled up there like bones in a charnel house.

They stop and switch seats once they’ve gotten past some traffic and entered into gently curving highways lined with unbroken stretches of trees, Tony letting Peter test out his learner’s permit on something other than a parking lot or neighborhood streets.

Tony tries to remember who taught him how to drive. One of their chauffeurs, probably, though in his memories a lot of it feels self-taught, like so many other things. Once, that would have made him angry and bitter to think about, but now the feeling is closer to regret. He feels almost sorry for his father, for missing out on something like this.

Tony watches the kid watch the road, smiling a little at the way Peter’s expression gets so serious when he’s concentrating on something. It’s the same expression he gets in the lab when he’s absorbed with some project. You’d think he wasn’t enjoying himself, looking at him, but Tony knows him better than that now.

They arrive at the little oyster place just before noon only to find that it’s closed down for the season, which would be a touch disappointing if the kid wasn’t there rambling on about how _cool_ and _cute_ everything is. Tony just finds it strange, which is to be expected—he hasn’t been back here in over two decades. The town is simultaneously familiar and completely foreign, and it’s making him feel disgustingly sentimental in a wistful, pining sort of way. 

They explore and stretch their legs for a little bit, and then they settle on another restaurant that’s perched right on the harbor and sit outside on the balcony overhanging the dock, even though the wind blowing in off the water is bitterly cold. 

“Maybe I’ll get one of those,” Tony says, pointing to one of the sleek racing yachts gliding through the steel-dark water.

“I can’t believe you don’t have like ten already,” Peter replies, holding his hands over his bowl of overpriced clam chowder to warm them in the rising steam. “I thought all rich dudes had one.”

“How many rich dudes do you know?”

“Mmm, just you, but you’re super rich. You’re like the equivalent of five rich guys.” Peter sits up straighter and pulls out his phone. Tony watches as he takes a picture of his bowl of soup.

“Don’t tell me you’re one of those obnoxious people who posts pictures of food on Facebook,” he says. “I swear to god, I’ll flip you right over this rail and dump you in the harbor if that’s what you’re doing.”

“You’re thinking of Instagram,” Peter says, balancing a roll on the edge of the bowl and taking another picture. “And no, I’m not. May wants pictures of the trip.”

Tony shakes his head in disgust. “We’re sitting here with a fantastic, picturesque view of the harbor, and you’re sending your aunt photos of clam chowder.”

“Well, yeah, but it’s kind of iconic New England, right?” Peter says, frowning. “Plus it’s proof you’re feeding me.”

“Does she seriously think I don’t feed you? My grocery bill has tripled since you started hanging around.”

“She worries about everything. She’ll invent things to worry about if she has to,” Peter says, finally turning in his chair to take a picture of the sailboats docked in the harbor. “It’s kinda her thing. Don’t take it personally.”

“I take it a little personally,” Tony says. Peter shrugs.

After lunch, they wander around some more through narrow cobblestone streets lined with charming, colonial-era buildings now housing stores and eateries that cater to a particular type of affluent New England clientele. It gets colder as the afternoon wears on and the sun dips lower, and eventually they decide on a hotel to check into to escape the biting wind for a bit. They don’t have a reservation, but the hotel is half-empty this time of year and they have no problem getting a pair of rooms close to one another. The desk agent upgrades them to nicer rooms with views of the harbor after Tony gives him his name, becoming exponentially more fawning and deferential once Tony’s identity is revealed. Peter pretends to vomit as soon as they’re out of sight of the front desk, and Tony pinches his ear good-naturedly.

“Let’s do a ghost tour,” Peter says after dinner in the hotel’s restaurant.

“Why the hell not,” Tony agrees, because it’s already dark outside and that sounds like a more wholesome activity than going back to his room and drinking alone until he falls asleep.

The ghost tour is cheesy and touristy and Tony ends up loving it for those very reasons. The tour guide is a college-aged woman whose aesthetic borrows heavily from Anne Rice and the Salem witch trials. She recognizes Tony immediately but unlike the hotel desk agent, she seems entirely unfazed by his presence in her group.

“Taylor Swift owns a mansion near here,” she mentions offhandedly, which seems to be her way of saying rich, famous celebrities are a dime a dozen in these parts and not something to bat an eye over. 

At some point the group is let loose to wander through a historic cemetery to try and capture photographs of orbs or commune with the dead or something. Some of the more enthusiastic amateur ghost hunters have whipped out recording devices to try and capture EVPs, calling out questions to the empty air, delightfully unselfconscious. Tony decides to sneak around the headstones and scare Peter.

He spots the kid standing in front of one of the headstones, attempting to decipher the worn writing on the age-mottled surface. Tony creeps up until he’s standing directly behind him, and then grabs Peter’s shoulders. “Boo.”

“God, you kids are so jaded these days,” Tony complains when Peter’s only reaction is to roll his eyes. “You’re the one who wanted to do this and you can’t even get into the spirit of it.” He waits a beat. “Get it? In the _spirit_.”

“Oh my god,” Peter groans, swiftly walking away. “People can hear you.”

“So, kid, are you convinced?” Tony asks, catching up to him. “Do you believe in spooks?”

“Not really, but I try to keep an open mind,” Peter says, stopping to take a picture of another headstone carved like the wings of an angel. “May believes though.”

“Really?” Tony asks, bouncing on the balls of his feet in a futile attempt to keep warm.

“Yeah. She says a lot of nurses do. They see a lotta weird shit on the job, I guess. Unexplainable things. She has a tons of creepy stories.” He pauses a moment. “And then there’s the thing with Ben.”

Tony stops bouncing and looks over at him. The kid rarely mentions his uncle. “What thing?”

Peter waves a hand, like he’s brushing away cobwebs. “It’s…silly, really. You don’t wanna hear it.”

“Try me.”

“Okay…it’s just…” The kid tucks his hands under his armpits and looks up at Tony with wide, solemn eyes. “She sometimes dreams about Ben, and she says it’s really him. His spirit or soul or whatever, coming to tell her things.” 

Maybe it’s the fact that they’re standing in an old, eerie cemetery at night and the ambiance is making him more susceptible, or maybe it’s the deadly serious expression on Peter’s face, but Tony can feel the hairs on the back of his neck standing up.

“You two ready to go?” a voice says directly behind them. They both jump and Tony blurts out a filthy swear. 

The gothy tour guide, still unfazed, motions to them. “We’re gonna move on now.”

She wanders off through the headstones. Tony looks at Peter and after a second they both start laughing, the sort of uncontrolled giggling that’s an after-effect of released tension.

“Don’t tell May I told you that,” Peter says, once their laughter has died down. “She’ll get super pissed off.”

“My lips are sealed,” Tony promises. And then, because he’s a man plagued by inappropriate curiosity, “Does she tell you what he says to her? Any news from the Great Beyond?”

“I dunno, just things like she’s doing a good job or whatever,” Peter says, shrugging. “I think it’s on her mind a lot, whether she’s doing the parenting thing right or screwing me up forever, so maybe her subconscious cooks up these dreams about him.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Tony says. “What about you?” he adds, because he’s also an asshole who excels at ruining the mood. “Does he ever make a stop by your room for a chat before heading back to wherever?”

“No,” the kid says, jamming his hands into the pockets of his jacket. “I mean, I dream about him, but they’re never good dreams like that.”

And, _fuck_ , that does it. They skip out on the rest of the tour and go back to the hotel after that. Tony’s feeling cold and little like a complete shithead and badly in need of a stiff drink.

“Can I sleep on the couch in your room?” Peter asks as they’re making the way down the hall to their rooms. 

“Sure, if you want. Did that ghost tour get to you after all?” Tony asks, swiping his keycard and ushering the kid through the door. “I don’t know why I keep paying for two rooms when half the time you end up bunking with me anyway.”

“I sleep better this way. I have a fear of abandonment,” the kid says, completely straight-faced. Tony can’t tell if he’s joking or not and it makes him feel old and a little sad, on top of everything else.

“You wanna watch a little TV or anything?” Tony asks after they’ve finished their nightly routines. He strips the duvet off the bed and tosses it over to Peter, who’s already stretched out on the couch looking half-asleep.

“Nah, I’m beat. Let’s just go to sleep.”

“Good choice,” Tony says, crawling into bed and switching off the lamp. “Very responsible.”

Tony lies on his back and stares up at the gray expanse of the ceiling overhead, listening to the faint rattle of the heating system in the walls and the distant blast of a foghorn from somewhere out beyond the harbor. He’s suddenly bone-tired, but sleep feels elusive.

“Hey, Pete,” Tony says softly.

“Mr. Stark?”

“I’m a real dick, alright? You already know that, but I am.”

A beat of silence. “Okay?”

Tony rolls onto his side. He can just make out Peter’s face in the dark, the duvet pulled up tight under his chin. 

“I shouldn’t have asked about your uncle like that when we were in the cemetery, I mean. I didn’t intend to make light of…what happened. It was tactless and poor timing and—”

“Mr. Stark, I was just kidding about the whole Ben visiting May in her dreams thing,” the kid cuts in. “It’s not true. It was just a joke and I started it, so don’t feel bad.”

Tony blinks at him. “You little shit. You looked so fucking serious, I thought...Jesus, kid, making jokes to deal with trauma is supposed to be my thing.”

“Sorry,” Peter says. “I really didn’t think you’d believe it like that.”

“You’re not sorry,” Tony accuses. “I’ve been over here just... _writhing_ in guilt, and you loved it, didn’t you?”

He can see the white flash of Peter’s teeth in the darkness. “Yeah, okay, it was pretty good.”

Tony chucks a pillow at him. “God, you’re a punk. You’re killing me.” 

He drops back into the rest of the pillows, releasing a long sigh as the tension he’s been carrying flows away. It’s always a relief, these reminders that Peter really is remarkably resilient despite the many hardships he’s already endured in his short life. It makes Tony feel a little bit better, like maybe this whole hero lifestyle won’t completely fuck the kid up. Maybe Tony won’t completely fuck him up, either.

“Mr. Stark?” Peter says after a moment.

“Yeah, kid.”

“You can ask me about Ben, though,” Peter says, back to sounding earnest. “It’s alright. It doesn’t bother me. I mean, it _does_ bother me, but talking about it doesn’t. Some people get really weird about it, or they avoid it, and honestly that’s way worse. But I think I’d like to tell you about him, sometime.”

“Alright, buddy, I’d like that, too,” Tony says, wishing he could see Peter’s face more clearly. There is something soft and tender in the moment that he tries to memorize before it inevitably ends, so that he won’t forget the shape and feel of it.

________________________

All that talk about ghosts must have gotten to him, too, because he dreams about his father that night. In the dream, they walk together along the pier, the same one Tony and Peter had strolled down earlier that day. It’s bitterly cold and windy and Howard is trying and failing to light a cigarette. 

“Damn,” Howard mutters as the wind swallows up the lighter’s flame again.

“Let me do it,” Tony says, taking the cigarette and lighter from him. He turns his back towards the wind and sticks the cigarette between his lips. He cups his hand around the lighter to protect the flame, gently drawing on the cigarette to get it to take light, until at last a curl of smoke licks against the protective cove of his palm. He hands the lit cigarette back to his father.

Howard’s lips curl up around the cigarette. “You did a good job, son.”

Tony doesn’t know if his father means lighting the cigarette or life in general or something else entirely, but he finds his first impulse is to scoff. He’s craved his father’s approval his entire life but suddenly it feels hollow and pointless, worth less than a grain of sand. 

As if Howard has any fucking right to judge him. 

________________________

In the morning, they eat breakfast at one of the many trendy cafes clustered around the harbor, and then they make the short drive to the beach. It’s even colder there along the shore with the wind coming howling in off the choppy waves, and they trudge through coarse pebbly sand and duck their heads against misty, stinging blasts of salty air. It would have a kind of rugged beauty to it, Tony thinks, if it weren’t so goddamn cold and wet and if the beach wasn’t strewn with reams of slimy red seaweed.

“I used to come here when I was a kid,” he says to Peter, who is still resolutely snapping pictures with gloveless hands gone bone white from the cold.

“Oh, yeah?” Peter says, stopping a moment and squinting into the wind as he tries to take a picture of the the whitecaps rolling and breaking along the ragged shoreline. 

“Yeah.” Tony frowns. He pictures his mother in a wide-brimmed sunhat, elegant sunglasses perched on her nose. Mimosas and lobster rolls in stately old hotels. Burying his toes in sun-warmed sand. Howard absent from it all, as he is in so many of Tony’s childhood memories, too busy with work to vacation with his family. 

“It’s a lot shittier than I remember, honestly,” he admits, feeling more disappointed than he thought he would. “I’ll take you somewhere better next time.”

“Oh, I think this is pretty great,” Peter says, turning and giving Tony a blue-lipped smile. 

“Seriously?” Tony asks.

“Yeah. I mean, I just really like spending time with you, so.” He waves a hand at Tony. “Stand over there so I can take a picture of you with that boat in the back.”

Tony shuffles over, something cinching tight in his chest and burning behind his eyes. He’s filled with a sudden, overwhelming urge to take Peter to all the places that make up his fondest childhood memories, and even the lesser ones, just so he can experience it all again with the kid this time around, see it from a fresh perspective. Or maybe it would be even better to take him somewhere without any attachments, good or bad, and make new memories entirely of their own.

Peter looks at him over the top of his phone. “Jeez, can you at least smile? I wanna send this to May and Miss Potts but you look like you’re about to cry or something.”

“It’s the wind,” Tony lies. 

“That still came out alright,” Peter says a moment later, looking at the picture he’s captured on the screen.

“Let’s do one together,” Tony says. “We haven’t taken a single picture together on this trip yet. We’ll take a selfie. I’m still cool enough for that, right?”

“I think so,” Peter says kindly.

“You flatter me.” Tony motions to him. “C’mon, bring it in close.”

Peter comes to stand next to him. Tony puts his arm around the kid’s shoulders and pulls him in tight against his side and smiles at the phone Peter is precariously holding out in front of them. The picture comes out a little blurry from all the shivering they’re doing, the two of them red-nosed from the cold and their hair a mess from the wind and grinning anyway.

He’ll get in the car later that day and take Peter home. The messy fallout of everything—the Accords and Steve Rogers and Secretary Ross and all the public fear and anger—will be there waiting for him, demanding action and resolution. But for now he holds tight to this very moment, so clarifying in all its bittersweet simplicity.

Things come together and things fall apart. This, though—he’s determined to make this last.


End file.
